Featured post

Buy All Quiet on the Home Front from ICVL STUDIO. It is also available now at the wonderful Tipi Bookshop in Belgium, at Photobookst...

Wednesday, 26 October 2011

Brown's Folly and Bicycle Mountains: Altered Landscapes

I don't think these places around Bath are quite Edgelands but they do resonate with a historicity that connects to Bath, the West Country and Georgian and Victorian history. The top picture is an informal BMX track (that nobody has used for a couple of years due to England's appalling summers). It sits between the River Avon and the Bath-London Railway. In the background is Grosvenor Place, a terrace of late regency houses which were to form one side of a huge pleasure garden that would form the entrance to Bath from the east. The land on which the jumps track was worked by engineers building Brunel's Great Western Railway in the 19th Century. Walk along the river a bit and you come to a row of terraces where the workers who did the digging used to live. Now, on the banks of the river, a little town of benders has cropped up.

The other pictures are from Brown's Folly, former Bath stone quarry and home to Boris, the world's second oldest bat. There is a network of caves under Brown's Folly. In the fifties the Ministry of Defence used the caves and mines to store explosives. In the nineties (I think) they pulled them out and burned the cordite, then collapsed the biggest of the caves - you can see the entrance in the bottom picture. The empty explosive casings used to fill the valley in the bottom picture. Now they have mostly rotted away, but new ones always come to the surface - old explosives in one of my very favourite landscapes.